A novel. A dark comedy about the madness of certainty.

"…the voice of a man holding a door shut against a thing that is  already in the room with him."

For forty years the Rev. Ambrose Mortimer, D.D., catalogued other men's certainties. For twenty-seven of them, at night, behind a door his family knew not to open, he was setting down his own.

THE GOD OF THIS WORLD is the book he never published and never quite disavowed — a learned, patient, and increasingly alarming inquiry into the office of the Forerunner in the present age, built verse by verse and number by number toward a conclusion its author went on re-checking for the rest of his life, in the hope that the arithmetic would change its mind.

He did not write it alone. In the margins stands his wife, Cassandra — a copy-editor by trade — correcting his figures, answering his revisions, on very nearly every page. "I am going to be flagging a great many pages," she writes early on, "and I would like it understood here at the outset that the flags are not malice. They are love, with a pencil."

They are printed here as they were found, the argument and the answers together, because after thirty-one years there was no honest way to publish one hand without the other.

They left us a tribute that became a reckoning, a work of scholarship that reads like a haunting, and a marriage conducted in the footnotes of the end of the world.